“Of course. I realize I am being emotional. It is difficult not to be at first, I suppose.”
“You should be thankful that your initial exposure to the hard necessities of the plan was so mild. There is worse to come.”
“So I have been told.”
“In abstract terms. But consider the i^liy. A government ambitious to restore the old nation will act aggressively, thus embroiling itself in prolonged wars with powerful neighbors. Both directly and indirectly, through the operation of economic factors they are too naïve to control, the aristocrats and freeholders will be eroded away by those wars. Anomic democracy will replace their system, first dominated by a corrupt capitalism and later by sheer force of whoever holds the central government. But there will be no place for the vast displaced proletariat, the one-time landowners and the foreigners incorporated by conquest. They will offer fertile soil to any demagogue. The empire will undergo endless upheaval, civil strife, despotism, decay, and outside invasion. Oh, we will have much to answer for before we are done!”
“Do you think ... when we see the final result …will the blood wash off us?”
“No. We pay the heaviest price of all.”
Spring in the high Sierra is cold, wet, snowbanks melting away from forest floor and giant rocks, rivers in spate until their canyons clang, a breeze ruffling puddles in the road. The first green breath across the aspen seems infinitely tender against pine and spruce, which gloom into a brilliant sky. A raven swoops low, gruk, gruk, look out for that damn hawk! But then you cross timber line and the world becomes tumbled blue-gray immensity, with the sun ablaze on what snows remain and the wind sounding hollow in your ears.
Captain Thomas Danielis,.Field Artillery, Loyalist Army of the Pacific States, turned his horse aside. He was a dark young man, slender and snub-nosed. Behind him a squad slipped and cursed, dripping mud from feet to helmets, trying to get a gun carrier unstuck. Its alcohol motor was too feeble to do more than spin the wheels. The infantry squelched on past, stoop-shouldered, worn down by altitude and a wet bivouac and pounds of mire on each boot. Their line snaked from around a prowlike crag, up the twisted road and over the ridge ahead. A gust brought the smell of sweat to Danielis.
But they were good joes, he thought. Ditty, dogged, they did their profane best. His own company, at least, was going to get hot food tonight, if he had to cook the quartermaster sergeant.
The horse’s hoofs banged on a block of ancient concrete jutting from the muck. If this had been the old days ... but wishes weren’t bullets. Beyond this part of the range lay lands mostly desert, claimed by the Saints, who were no longer a menace but with whom there was scant commerce. So the mountain highways had never been considered worth repaving, and the railroad ended at Hangtown. Therefore the expeditionary force to the Tahoe area must slog through unpeopled forests and icy uplands, God help the poor bastards..
God help them in Nakamura, too, Danielis thought. His mouth drew taut, he slapped his hands together and spurred the horse with needless violence. Sparks shot from iron shoes as the beast clattered off the road toward the highest point of the ridge. The man’s saber banged his leg.
Reining in, he unlimbered his field glasses. From here he could look across a jumbled sweep of mountainscape, when cloud shadows sailed over cliffs and boulders, down into the gloom of a canyon and across to the other side. A few tufts of grass thrust out beneath him, mummy brown, and a marmot wakened early from winter sleep whistled somewhere in the stone confusion. He still couldn’t see the castle. Nor had he expected to, as yet. He knew this country ... how well he did!
There might be a glimpse of hostile activity, though. It had been eerie to march this far with no sign of the enemy, of anyone else whatsoever; to send out patrols in search of rebel units that could not be found; to ride with shoulder muscles ... tense against the sniper’s arrow that never came. Old Jimbo Mackenzie was not one to sit passive behind walls, and the Rolling Stones had not been given their nickname in jest.
If Jimbo is alive. How do I know he is? That buzzard yonder may be the very one which hacked out his eyes.
Danielis bit his lip and made himself look steadily through the glasses. Don’t think about Mackenzie, how he outroared and outdrank and outlaughed you and you never minded, how he sat knotting his brows over the chessboard where you could mop him up ten times out of ten and he never cared, how proud and happy he stood at the wedding ... Nor think about Laura, who tried to keep you from knowing how often she wept at night, who now bore a grandchild beneath her heart and woke alone in the San Francisco house from the evil dreams of pregnancy. Every one of those dogfaces plodding toward the castle which has killed every army ever sent against it—every one of them has somebody at home and and hell rejoices at how many have somebody on the rebel side. Better to look for hostile spoor and let it go at that.
Wait! Danielis stiffened. A rider—He focused. One of our own. Fallon’s army added a blue band to the uniform. Returning scout. A tingle went along his spine. He decided to hear the report firsthand. But the fellow was still a mile off, perforce riding slowly over the hugger-mugger terrain. There was no hurry about intercepting him. Danielis continued to survey the land.
A reconnaissance plane appeared, an ungainly dragonfly with sunlight flashing off a propeller head. Its drone bumbled among rock wails, where echoes threw the noise back and forth. Doubtless an auxiliary to the scouts, employing two-way communication. Later the plane would work as a spotter for artillery. There was no use making a bomber of it: Nakamura was proof against anything that today’s craft could drop, and might well shoot the thing down.
A shoe scraped behind Danielis. Horse and man whirled as one. His pistol jumped into his hand.
It lowered. “Oh ... Excuse me, Philosopher.”
The man in the blue robe nodded. A smile softened his face. He must be around sixty years old, hair white and lined, but he walked these heights like a wild goat. The Ying and Yang symbol burned gold on his breast.
“You’re needlessly on edge, son,” he said. A trace of Texas accent stretched out his words. The Espers obeyed the laws wherever they lived, but acknowledged no country their own: nothing less than mankind, perhaps ultimately all life throughout the space-time universe. Nevertheless, the Pacific States had gained enormously in prestige and influence when the Order’s unenterable Central was estblished in San Francisco at the time when the city was being rebuilt in earnest. There had been no objection—on the contrary—to the Grand Seeker’s desire that Philosopher Woodworth accompany the expedition as an observer. Not even from the chaplains; the churches had finally gotten it straight that the Esper teachings were neutral with respect to religion.
Danielis managed a grin. “Can you blame me?”
“No blame. But advice. Your attitude isn’t useful. Does nothin’ but wear out. You’ve been fightin’ a battle for weeks before it began.”
Danielis remembered the apostle who had visited his home in San Francisco—by invitation, in the hope that Laura might learn some peace. His simile had been still homelier: “You only need to wash one dish at a time.” The memory brought a smart to Danielis’ eyes, so that he said roughly:
“I might relax if you’d use your powers to tell me what’s waiting for us.”
“I’m no adept, son. Too much in the material world, I’m afraid. Somebody’s got to do the practical work of the Order, and someday I’ll get the chance to retire and explore the frontier inside me. But you need to start early, and stick to it a lifetime, to develop your full powers.” Woodworth looked across the peaks, seemed almost to merge himself with their loneliness.